I was born in 1961 and grew up in southwestern Montana and raised in a good Catholic family with five siblings. The Sunday sermons, hymns, prayers, and responses shaped my ideas of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When I was seventeen, I discovered a nondenominational Christian ministry, attended Bible college, and spent the next twenty-one years devoted to studying and teaching the Old and New Testament. ‘The word of God is the will of God’ and ‘It is written’ were credos that shaped our fundamentalist Christian faith. But the more I learned, the more questions I had about the bipolar behavior of the god of the Old Testament and the misogynist tendencies of the New Testament god.
In November of 1999, my husband lost a two-year battle with kidney cancer. He was forty-five and I was thirty-eight. While Peter was fighting for his life, the church leadership engaged in ‘spiritual victim blaming’. He would be healed if he would get straight with God and confess his ‘broken fellowship’ to them. Their despicable behavior enlightened me. After Peter passed away, my new perspective gave me the courage to leave a twenty-year-old network of friends knowing they’d be told to ‘mark and avoid’ me when I turned away from the church, an apostate. I refused to continue to raise my two daughters in this toxic environment. With the dawn of a new millennium, I began my journey into the wider world of faiths.
I visited church services and read about religions my former church considered idolatrous. With no one to judge me, I became intensely curious. I discovered the Nag Hammadi Library about five years ago. The Gnostics who wrote the majority of the text were early Christians who struggled with the same questions I had. In particular, the origin stories in Genesis frustrated me. Why had Eve become a scapegoat for the human condition? The concept of original sin made no sense to me. While I bruised my common sense by beating on the walls of scriptural contradictions, the Gnostics simply planted several sticks of dynamite in the cornerstone of Genesis and blew a hole right through it. They kept the main characters though, characters that people strongly associate with. In her essay about the gnostic origin stories of Eve, Elaine Pagels points out beautifully that “gnostic Christians, rather than rejecting the Genesis accounts altogether, chose to treat them as a shimmering surface of symbols, one that invited the spiritually adventurous to plunge in and explore their hidden depths.” Their worlds were filled with female deities full of power, creativity, and wisdom. They created stories without dogmatic boundaries, unlike the fundamentalist Christian strictures I was so accustomed to. It was refreshing and heretical. What were the early Christians really like? I found that these Christians were very different than the ones I had imagined through the filters of Catholicism and Bible college. I was hooked.
In 2020, I began writing a novel to practice the creative license I found in the gnostic gospels. My story retells gnostic myths that intersect with one another in a cohesive way. The Gnostics dealt with political oppression, appropriation of women’s bodies, and soul-sucking environments vividly represented in their evil characters. Yaldabaoth, also known as Sakla which means ‘fool’, is an insatiable demiurge. He embodies arrogance, and is a blind and ignorant god because he believes that he was unbegotten, that no higher entity could have created him. He believed himself to be ‘the One and Only’ god. He emanates seven sons and an army of envious but loyal minions called archons. His dark world is balanced by non-violent luminaries, and interestingly, the most powerful light beings are feminine or androgynous entities.
I came across the phrase ‘feminist revisionist mythmaking’ while I was looking for ‘comps’, to write my query letter to find an agent. The phrase was new to me. I found that it applied to books like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, a retelling of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, or Madeline Miller’s Circe. Was that what I had done in my novel? Indeed, it was. Instead of retelling Greek mythology, I was reimagining gnostic myths.
What is Revisionist Mythmaking?
Revisionist mythmaking is not reductive, but expansive. It attempts to cast the meaning of ancient stories through a new lens, one that can be viewed through modern eyes. Over the course of thousands of years, new challenges arise, and the morals of old stories fall short. They’re no longer believable. The gods lose their luster and become suspicious. So now what?
Consider an old house that has fallen into disrepair. The house has ‘good bones’, so the frame is kept. The roof, walls, and floors are stripped off and discarded. The frame holds stories in old bones composed of ancestral wisdom. We need the frame to associate the old with the new, to build upon it. New walls are nailed to the frame but now they’re scripted with new information—a repository of conversations buzzing between the people who reject the old walls, those old gods who haven’t delivered on their promises. The old gods are demoted. Maybe they’re locked in the basement. A new roof and a new floor; a new heaven and a new earth is in order. New hope and new saviors are hoisted onto the frame, ones more intelligent and enlightened than the old frail ones. New gods and goddesses are laid upon the frame who have a new type of relationship with the people moving in.
In her article “The Gnostic Imagination and Its Imaginaries”, April DeConick shows the transition from old gods to new ones by pointing out that the old religions were based on certain ‘scripts’: the slave script, the vassal script, and the client script. In the slave script, gods are the masters of humans they created as slaves to serve them. In the vassal script, gods are kings and lawgivers, therefore humans serve them and rely on them for their survival. In the client script, the gods are patrons with responsibilities toward humans who depend on their kindness. Humans must show their loyalty to the patron gods to receive favors. The Gnostics rejected all three.
These colonized people felt that their indigenous protector and patron Gods had failed them on the job. Their own faithfulness to the old Gods seemed ineffective to them. No matter what they did, they suffered. They wanted an explanation. They sought their answer in primordiality, hoping to learn first-hand how the traditional Gods came on the scene and what went wrong. They were convinced that behind the moral order there must stand a metaphysical order that makes sense.
So the Gnostics adopted a new script, the kinfolk script. “This script echoes the terror of families torn apart by involuntary conscription, piracy, kidnapping, and war. They develop the kinfolk theory of religion by imagining Gods and humans as biological next-of-kin rather than separate species. They begin to think about humans as mortal Gods who got separated from their divine parents.”1 In retaliation, the Gnostics built a new home for their gods, one that was genetic, in their spiritual DNA so to speak. They were brave enough to tell new stories. Rather than satisfying themselves with subtle revisions of old myths, their origin stories were outright inversions of the Genesis creation story. This shocked and enraged the Apostolic Roman Catholic church fathers, who were threatened by the growth of the gnostic movement so they labeled them heretics.
These heretical authors had a talent for demoting old gods and creating new ones. The new 'kinfolk script' made the slavery, vassal, and patron scripts reproachable. The idea of being one big human and divine family attracted people to the teachings. However, in demoting the old gods, the god-like bishops and Roman authorities were demoted with them. The Gnostics were labeled heretics by the early church fathers to deter the various sects from growing and eventually the movement dwindled away.
The gnostic authors of three central texts (mentioned below) built new worlds to recontextualize the myths that failed them. They chose to start in the beginning with an origin story their new spiritual parentage could play a part in. The Gnostics sects believed that they had the right to express themselves because they believed in their innate spiritual ability to discern the truth. In her essay, “Pursuing the Spiritual Eve”, Elaine Pagels points out that the Gnostics’ creativity was used against them to defame the movement.
Accused of treating the scriptures with contempt, the gnostic Christians might well reply that they hold them in highest regard precisely by not accepting their mere face value. Even the most unlikely passages, such as Genesis 2-3, may yield, through spiritual exegesis, insight into the deepest truths.2
In other words, they believed they had the God-given right to express their own truths. They reclaimed their voices while under the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire.
I recommend the following three texts from the Nag Hammadi Scriptures to give you a sense of the gnostic mind in relation to origin stories. The Origins of the World, The Hypostasis of the Archons (sometimes known as The Nature of the Rulers), and The Apocryphon (or Secret) Book of John all contain key ideas about the world, political powers, and humanity from the imaginaries of gnostic thinkers in the first three or four centuries CE. These three books share ideas and blended stories that don’t always agree but never fail to be compelling.
Gnostics attribute the creation of the world to evil entities, Yaldabaoth and his consort, Lower Pronoia, and Eros, with some intercession from holy entities, like Pistis and Adam of Light. Overall, the Gnostics see the material world, including their physical bodies, as a prison they will eventually escape by ascending to the Pleroma where their final destination lies.
I disagree with this approach. We’ve looked to the heavens as our final destination for way too long and have separated ourselves from our environment. The earth, much like a woman, has been over-used and under-appreciated. It’s not time to escape. It’s time to return.
Ecofeminist Revisionist Mythmaking
In Abrahamic faiths, the ‘world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through” is a common theme. The attitude that the earth is a temporary home to meet humankind’s physical and economic needs has led to competitive overconsumption. The climate and extinction crises have steadily increased after thousands of years of abuse and neglect accelerating dramatically in the last few hundred years.
The Gnostic viewpoint of the world is far from a cure. They viewed the material world and its rulers as a creation that failed them. Instead of the benevolent God of Genesis, the world must have been created by an evil god to enslave them. That was their reality, so that’s the story they told. Rather than changing an unchangeable world, they sought to escape it. Today, the same theme is depicted in apocalypse books and films where the elites escape a dying earth to survive in outer space or on Mars. In the first few centuries, the Gnostics found ways to escape the world and its rulers by rejecting the material world and their physical bodies through rituals, songs, and stories. Some practiced asceticism, and some refused to bring children into the world which may have attributed to their decline. The end goal was to become a kingless generation by ascending to heaven, the Pleroma above.
Ecofeminist revisionist mythmaking could be a catalyst to ignite imaginations to emphasize morals that value the earth and the species that occupy it, including ourselves. We have a plethora of male-centric mythology full of bright swords and testosterone-laden battle cries. It’s time for new voices to create stories that speak to challenges of the 21st century and to envision morals that restore earth-bound values. A wonderful example of ecofeminist revisionist mythmaking is “She Unnames Them”, a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin that revises the story of Adam and Eve. The act of naming is an act of exercising authority over the named. *Spoiler Alert: click this link to read the story before going on!*
When Adam named the animals, he erected a ‘clear’ barrier between Eve and the creatures of the earth. Eve decides to resolve this by unnaming them, and all but a faction of yaks don’t protest. “Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element.” Before she leaves Adam she returns her given name to him. “I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, ‘You and your father lent me this, gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately…’”3 Eve unnames herself and expresses her liberation by leaving Adam and walking down the path to join the unnamed creation. In her masterful ecofeminist revisionist mythmaking, Le Guin retains the characters Adam and Eve and Adam’s Father God as bones of the story, and tears down the walls of ownership and otherness naming erects to create a new moral; oneness with nature.
In my novel (still in progress), I retain the bones of Gnostic theories that resonate with me and use them as a frame to reconstruct a new story. I rip down the old walls where an evil god and his archons created the earth. Yaldabaoth gets no credit for the obvious beauty and intelligent design found in nature. The earth’s fecundity and potency is solely her own, with no creator other than her own innate wisdom and energy.
People have strong emotional bonds with gods and Biblical characters developed in childhood and beyond. It’s the same dynamic that we form with fictional characters in a book or TV series we love. When the series ends, we’re sad to see them go. There are no more adventures with them to see what happens next. Revisionist mythmaking brings these loved, (or hated), characters back to life in the worlds of the author’s making. I’m enjoying creating my own version of ecofeminist revisionist mythmaking. It’s like a big kettle of savory and salty ingredients that I’ve gathered while earning my Religious Studies and English majors at ASU. I’m almost ready to put the proverbial stew on the stove to simmer so that I can share it with you.
April DeConick, “The Gnostic Imagination and Its Imaginaries” Gnosis 8, no. 2, (July 2023): 139.
Elaine Pagels, “Pursuing the Spiritual Eve” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen King (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), 205.
Ursula K Le Guin. "She Unnames Them." New Yorker, January 21, 1985.